The Loneliness of DEI
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices on college and university campuses are under intense scrutiny nationwide, and rightfully so. DEI offices are divisive; they create toxic environments that make students afraid to speak on campus. They ascribe particular traits and scripts in the most reductionist way possible to students based on characteristics such as faith, race, and sexuality and functionally prejudice and condition how students will interact and engage with each other.
As a result, open mindedness is disappearing, and students enter a collegiate culture curated by DEI offices that contribute to severe social and emotional challenges for students. Because students are siloed and silenced, DEI offices are heavily contributing to the loneliness epidemic present on our campuses.
While it may not be immediately apparent, students on college campuses today are lonely and disconnected from others. Unsurprisingly, Inside Higher Education’s latest headlining article, “The New Plague on Campus: Loneliness” highlights Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s new initiative “We are Made to Connect.” Murthy, “heard from young students who were on college campuses who would say, ‘I’m surrounded by hundreds of other kids here, but I don’t know; I feel like nobody really knows me for who I am. I feel like I can’t be myself.”
The data generally back this up. Even before Covid-19 and the lockdowns, younger Americans were disconnected from each other. Data from the American Enterprise Institute’s 2019 Survey on Community and Society demonstrated that younger Americans were considerably more lonely and isolated than older Americans. For instance, 44 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds report feeling completely alone at least “sometimes”, compared to just 19 percent of 60- to 70-year-olds.
Fifty percent of younger Americans say that they “sometimes” feel isolated from others, compared to 30 percent of those 60 years and older. October 2023 data from Gallup confirms this trend showing that while 17 percent of people over 65 worldwide say they feel lonely, 27 percent of the 19–29 cohort feel the same. A 2023 Gallup poll of college students found that roughly 4 in 10 reported experiencing loneliness the previous day. For campuses that are densely populated by peers, this is problematic.
Weak institutions, coupled with social media’s stranglehold on Gen Z, are undoubtedly part of the story. But DEI offices are making the problem worse, splintering students in social spaces, invoking identity politics, generating narratives of harm, and regularly promoting segregated activities. As a professor, students tell me regularly that being subjected to constant tribal political and social messaging makes it challenging to be open and to connect, intellectually and emotionally, with each other. As a former DEI official notes, “DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” Some groups of students are placed in the oppressor category, such as Jews and Israel, which is branded as a “genocidal, settler, colonialist state.”
It is not just Jews who suffer from DEI either. At Harvard, the DEI office is quite transparent in terms of which students they seek to help; namely “people of color, women, persons with disabilities, people who identify as LGBTQIA, and those are at the intersections of these identities.” Those who are not on this list, such as men, whites, Jews, and Asians, are oppressors and generally unwelcome. How could this be a healthy framework for students to connect to one another?
DEI’s built-in tribalism embraces what Paul Gigot has called, “A politics fixed on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments” and students are conditioned not to focus on shared values, experiences, trials, and tribulations but on the idea that their peers are causing them harm.
If colleges teach a binary worldview of oppressors and oppressed, it is almost impossible for students to develop connections with empathy, compassion, and trust with anyone outside their narrow identities. Polarization and student’s sense of loneliness and isolation only grows.
Fortunately, some states, such as Texas and Florida, are rightly dismantling these offices, and others are planning to take action. Removing DEI would be a huge help as would cutting down on the related affinity centers and segregated housing proposals that have been on the rise.
DEI dogma poisons student interaction. Students cannot be themselves and share their authentic selves. Instead, they are constantly on guard, living under the threat of bias reporting hotlines should they deviate from the DEI tribal norms.
College life does not have to be this way; let students connect, struggle, and learn from differences in shared spaces and get administrators off campus immediately. This will go a long way to fixing so much of the loneliness and isolation on campus today.
